FIRS paid N4.62tn to FG in 11 months

A total sum of N4.62tn has been paid into the federation account between January and November this year by the Federal Inland Revenue Service, figures obtained from the Ministry of Finance have revealed.

The amount is contained in a document presented to the ministry during the Federation Account Allocation Committee meeting.
Details of the revenue payment were obtained on Thursday in Abuja by our correspondent.

The committee, headed by the Minister of State for Finance, Mrs Zainab Ahmed, is made up of commissioners for finance from the 36 states of the federation; the Accountant-General of the Federation, Alhaji Ahmed Idris, and representatives from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation.

Others are representatives from the Federal Inland Revenue Service, the Nigeria Customs Service; Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission, as well as the Central Bank of Nigeria

The federation account is currently being managed on a legal framework that allows funds to be shared under three major components -statutory allocation, Value Added Tax distribution, and allocation made under the derivation principle.

The FIRS in the document stated that N4.62tn revenue was collected from three major categories of taxes.

They are Petroleum Profit Tax where the sum of N2.3tn was collected, Companies Income Tax which generated N1.31tn and Value Added Tax where the sum of N1tn was received.

A monthly breakdown of the N4.62tn revenue figure showed the sum of N353.27bn was remitted in the month of January while February, March and April had N450.46bn, N319.08bn and N428.44bn respectively.

For the month of May, the sum of N384.84bn was paid into the federation account while N457.57bn, N408.93bn and N492.58bn were remitted in June, July and August in that order.
For September, the sum of N370.5bn was paid into the coffers of the government while the service also remitted the sum of N473.72bn and N485.51bn in the month of October and November respectively.

The document read in part, “The PPT collection for the month of November 2018, was N232.53bn.

“This performance is lower than that of October 2018, of N276.05bn by N43.51bn or 15.76 per cent. It is also lower than the 2018 approved monthly target of N298.02bn, by N65.39bn.

“The reason for the decrease in the PPT collections was due to lower receipt of PPT.

“The CIT collection for November 2018, amounted to N160.89bn. When compared with the 2018 approved monthly target of N165.28bn, it shows a decrease of N4.38bn or 2.66 per cent.

“This represents a performance level of 73.94 per cent to the target. However, it was higher than the previous month’s collection of N92.5bn by N68.39bn by 73.94 per cent.

“The increase in CIT when compared with the previous month’s collection can be attributed to the receipt of NLNG (Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas) corporate tax payment.”

The FIRS Executive Chairman, Mr Tunde Fowler, had while speaking at the 13th General Assembly Meeting of the West African Tax Administration Forum, said through the deployment of Information Communications Technology equipment, the service had been able to fast track tax payment compliance.

He said, “In Nigeria, we have in the past two years taken the route of increasing the use of Information and Communications Technology in facilitating taxpayers’ compliance and introduced initiatives to improve inter-agency collaboration, all with a view to enhancing tax administration and reduce tax revenue leakages.

“Our efforts in this regard have made an impact and contributed to an increase in the taxpayers roll.”